_____The thing that so pleases me about DMT is that, you know, a lot of people will not take a psychedelic like LSD and Psilocybin or something because it lasts hours and hours and inevitably when dealing with things that last that long you're gonna end up dealing with 'your stuff'. Your anxieties, your fears, your this & that.. A lot of people dont care for that sort of thing, whether that's good or bad is another issue. With DMT -it lasts four minutes- and how *lost* can you get in an examination of childhood trauma in four minutes, especially when you've got hundreds of elves tugging at your coatsleaves?

There’s No Way Out of It!

On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

Graywolf, 205 pp., $24.00

Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

by Paul A. Offit, M.D.

Basic Books, 231 pp., $27.99

Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University Peter Paul Rubens: Achilles Dipped into the River Styx, circa 1630–1635 Even many years later, when my mother told the story, fear still showed on her face. One morning in 1954, at the age of two, I awoke and told her that my head hurt. I had a fever, and she put me to bed. Over the next days, my temperature rose, and my headache worsened. My parents called our pediatrician, who came to our small apartment in Astoria, Queens. He found that my neck was stiff and my legs were weak. Polio, he said, was a possible diagnosis. There were tens of thousands of cases of the paralytic illness each year in the United States. The doctor insisted that I be hospitalized in an isolation unit in upper Manhattan. My parents readily complied.After a week in the hospital, my temperature fell and my legs became stronger. Tests showed that it was not polio; the infection was never identified.1My mother and father feared debility and death due to pathogens. They were raised in immigrant New York neighborhoods at a time when diphtheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis were rife. My parents also knew that microbes were not restricted to the newly arrived and poor. Polio had struck the patrician FDR in his prime.The world of my parents, and that of their children, dramatically improved in the latter half of the twentieth century as modern medicine introduced an array of effective vaccines and antibiotics. When the Salk vaccine against the polio virus became available a few years after my mysterious illness, I was inoculated, along with my siblings. The idea of preventing or curing dreaded infectious diseases “naturally,” relying on the body alone, hardly entered our minds.But two generations later, such ideas have considerable traction in our society. Eula Biss, a writer who teaches at Northwestern University, seeks to understand their appeal, and whether they should be given credence. On Immunity is an effort to reconcile her divided feelings, fearing both infection and the imagined risks of vaccination. Her book weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.